Advances in transportation technology have made people around the world increasingly mobile. Larger numbers of people now travel greater and greater distances from home. For example, there is an increasing amount of international travel in which business travelers and tourists find themselves outside of the geographical regions where their native languages are normally spoken.
In addition to moving about more freely, people are becoming increasingly reliant on telephones as a means of communicating with each other and as a means of obtaining information and other services. The telecommunications services provided by each telecommunications service provider are usually limited to certain restricted geographical areas. Convenient contractual arrangements involving billing for past services rendered are in place only for those customers usually located in the area served by each service provider. All others must normally use prepay systems such as pay telephones to obtain service. This may be inconvenient for long distance calls as a large amount of currency or a particular credit card or phone card must be available. An international traveler who is not fluent in the language of the region served by a telecommunications service provider has an additional burden in using the telephone in that instructions in his native language on how to use the telephone are normally unavailable. An international traveler also is not easily able to obtain information such as weather or news from a local telephone system in his or her own language. International travelers thus have at least two significant hurdles to overcome before a local telephone system can be effectively put to use. First, a large amount of currency or a credit card not normally available to everyone must be used to gain access to the telephone system. Second, assistance and information is available only in a language foreign to the international traveler.
There have been attempts in the past to provide pre-paid telephone service said to be of use to travelers and tourists. See, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,706,275 issued to Kamil. These efforts fall short, however, because they do not involve multilingual capabilities of use to international travelers. They also involve rudimentary network architectures incapable of handling the high volume of call traffic on today's high capacity telephone networks. The customer verification procedures are also rudimentary, thereby making such systems subject to fraud.
There also have been efforts to develop a pay phone providing multilingual instructions to a user on how to complete a phone call. See, Maltezos U.S. Pat. No. 5,014,301 issued to Maltezos. These efforts are unsatisfactory because a specially configured pay phone must be provided and the multilingual capabilities are severely limited. This arrangement has all of the usual disadvantages of pay phones with a limited ability to provide a multilingual capability apart from merely making announcements about how to make a call.